


Winter Kisses Drabbles

by waldorph



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blanket Permission, Drabble Collection, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 11:31:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 7,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1467892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/pseuds/waldorph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is where I'm keeping all the drabbles from tumblr. Note the very thought-provoking title.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_prompt: I WANT LIKE FIFTEEN BILLION STORIES WHERE BUCKY HAS TO LEARN TO BE A HUMAN BEING AGAIN AND HE SUPER FUCKING HATES IT BUT ... STEVE. - lazulisong_

**walking.**  
Apparently walking is a thing he has to learn how to do again.  
"You walk like you’re trying to kill someone, Bucky," Steve says, in what Bucky knows sounds like a supportive tone to the idiots around them, but what is, in fact, Steve Rogers’ patented Why Are You Such A Moron voice.  
"People don’t talk to me when I walk like this," Bucky points out.  
"They also won’t give you coffee."  
And well, fine.

* * *

**bedtime.**  
The sleeping thing is rough. He thinks it’s safe to blame that on—well, life in general. He’s been frozen on and off for years, and they never kept him awake long enough to need to sleep (he thinks it’s why—well, he thinks that the sleep deprivation contributed to his programming failing). Before that, it’s been the goddamn war, and you slept when you could, where you could. And before that, there’d been the odd jobs Bucky had always worked, anything for an extra penny. 

Steve, who’s always slept like a goddamn princess, doesn’t want to hear it. He throws a futon mattress on the floor (Bucky doesn’t even know what a futon is) and pointedly goes to bed. Bucky lays there, and he can feel Steve looking at him. 

"Just go to sleep," Bucky snaps, night after night after fucking night.

"You’re keeping me up," Steve replies. 

They go to bed at 9:30 and wake up at 7:00, like they’re actually 95 and 96. 

"I didn’t want to say anything," Steve says over waffles when Bucky points it out, "but you could really use the beauty sleep, Buck." 

Bucky smacks him. “Punk.”

(He gets used to it—eventually. He just requires some physical exertion before he goes to bed, and if he enlists Steve in that—well. It’s for a good cause, and Steve’s always been a sucker for those.)

* * *

**eating.**  
Steve Rogers can’t cook. Bucky doesn’t know who thought Steve could cook, but he can’t. Sarah Rogers taught Bucky all the family recipes because Steve was never going to carry on the family traditions, only shame.

The Winter Soldier didn’t eat for taste, he ate for sustenance. And it’s a weird thing, retraining himself from that. To eat and enjoy it, to consider a meal, to sit down and consume. 

But there’s more available now than boiled dinners and potatoes and whatever things you could get cheap.

"Everyone eats well now," Steve says one night over Indian food. "It’s not seasonal, and you don’t have to make a bone last for a whole winter."

That’d been a bad winter—Steve’d been sick a lot, Bucky’d been working to help support both their families, and Sarah’d just started getting sick. There’d been one bone and by the time they threw it out, they’d gotten months’-worth of broth from it. 

They get a lot of take out, places they have to look up, because Bucky thinks he’s been to at least some of them, but can’t remember. It’s easier, somehow, to eat it when it’s an adventure, a fixed point of shared experience instead of—well. This is good.

* * *

**dating.**  
“You clean up nice, I don’t get why you think she wouldn’t,” Steve says, rifling through his mail. The girl in 9H just flirted with Bucky, and Steve is offended on her behalf that Bucky wasn’t fumbling all over himself to get her number.

"I got a mirror," Bucky points out, because he knows he cleans up nice. He knows, even with the metal arm, he’s got enough going on that a girl will forgive that. Knows he can spin it into a sob story—hell, could just say wounded in combat, which is true. Doesn’t even need a cover—

But that’s the problem. He thinks about it all as covers, lies, how to seduce, edit his own history, get what he wants and then go. And maybe that was how it was, before the war. Maybe that’s how they’d been, but he can’t remember. And even if it was, it was a game, simple and light-hearted and nothing like being whored out for a cause. 

"So?" Steve prompts, and Bucky longs for the days when he was goading Steve into dates, not the other way around. 

"So no." 

Steve sighs, and picks up a take-out menu as Bucky locks the door of the apartment. He’s seen—they’ve come a long way. Guys who date other guys don’t have it as bad—can even marry, in New York. They even got a word for people who like both, but—thing is. There are other things Bucky’s got to get right. Like going into crowds, feeling threatened, walking like a human, having a social interaction, eating three meals a day and sleeping at night.  
The whole dating thing—

"Sudanese?" Steve asks. 

"Yeah," Bucky says, and then sighs when Steve hands him the phone to order, because Steve hates ordering food.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> beyondiceandsteel said:  
> The first time Steve ever rode a motorcycle (and Bucky rode with him). Post-CATWS (first time post-recovery) or WWII.

The first time Steve rides a bike, it’s Monty’s. Well, it was originally an enemy’s, but they’ve liberated it, and Monty loves that thing. Bucky thinks it’s great—Monty laughs the least, of all of them, and it’s not just dry English stiff-upper-lip. One day, though, Monty catches Steve looking, and says, 

"Ever ridden?"

Steve hasn’t—not a lot bikes in Brooklyn, and besides that between Mrs. Rogers and Bucky, they would have killed him for even  _looking_. Bucky doesn’t love that Steve has accused him of being an overbearing, henpicking housewife, but Steve’s not really  _wrong_. Bucky prefers to accept the fact that Steve is a fucking idiot and Bucky’s common sense is being misinterpreted by a fucking idiot. 

Steve looks at Bucky and says, “No, but it’s alright, I’d probably crack my head open.”

"If you did, would you bleed red white and blue?" Dum-Dum asks, and they all laugh and Bucky thinks that’s the end of it.

That’s not the end of it. He and Morita and Gabe come back from scouting (nothing, HYDRA hasn’t been here in weeks), and Monty and Dum-Dum and Frenchy are all shouting as Steve tears by on the bike. 

Monty at least has the sense to look guilty when Bucky looks at him, and when Steve wipes out Bucky has to remind himself that this is an all-new Steve. This Steve doesn’t have brittle bones and won’t break, this body can run faster than any human and is strong and jumps across whole damn buildings. 

And Steve likes it, so Bucky grits his teeth and accepts that this is just another bullshit part of war.

*

"We’re gonna see the world," Steve announces. Bucky stares at the bike. 

"I’m not getting on a bike with you," he replies. "I remember enough."

Steve shrugs easily. 

"And I don’t have a passport," Bucky adds, and Steve sighs like Bucky is driving him crazy. Which is rich, because Bucky’s anxiety about Steve on a bike with a stupid little skullcap of a helmet is like a vice-grips around his chest. 

"Get on the bike, Buck," he says. 

Bucky gets on the bike, has a moment where he’s not sure where to put his hands and then remembers that this is  _Steve_. That the broad back and the height are still strange, but it’s Steve, and Bucky tucks up against him.

The bike still sucks, and Bucky makes Steve rent a car as soon as they hit New Jersey. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dark-cynic said:  
> AU where you have a string tied to your pinky that points to your soul mate that only you can see (only extends about three inches from your pinky) and only disappears when they die (or are frozen so their heart pretty much stops) for steve/bucky?

It hadn’t really been a big deal when they were kids. Their mothers had exchanged long looks and said that sometimes your soulmate wasn’t who you were supposed to marry, it was your dearest friend, which was why sometimes girls had girls and boys had boys. Steve and Bucky had pressed their fingers together, watching the red string shrink, and then had sprinted down opposite ends of the street. The string never broke, though once out of view it was just like a ring, the knot shifting direction depending on where the other was.

Steve’s mama didn’t have her red ring anymore. Not since Steve’s dad died, she said it just fell off one day and she’d known. It’d been like a piece of twine, something Steve had been able to pick up while his mother sobbed, taking it from him and looking for the rest, for the line she should have been able to see if she looked hard enough.

They’d gotten older, and there had been a couple times when Steve had wondered if maybe it’d been a lie. Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Redding lived together, had always lived together, never gotten married, and Bucky said that it was because they loved each other (but not like sisters, like married people). Steve had looked at the string tethering him to Bucky, and thought, Oh.

*

Gabe helps pull him back into the train car. Reminds him they’re here to do a job, and they get Zola back, and then Steve goes to his room and takes off his glove. He doesn’t look at his hand, because he doesn’t—he can’t. But he tips the glove, shakes it, and sure enough a forlorn red twine falls out, hits the ground faster than it should. and Steve can’t breathe, because that means Bucky’s really gone, and he only just makes it to the sink to throw up.

*

It’s war, it’s not that uncommon to see bare fingers. The polite thing to do is not to comment, to let your eyes slide over its absence, but in the wake of his loss there are a lot of people who touch his bare pinky with theirs—almost accidentally. You’re not alone.

*

They wake him up, and no one’s surprised by his bare finger. It’s been 70-odd years, of course his soulmate is dead. Except that he pulls off his gloves after they get off the ship and start heading back to DC, and it’s there. 

And it’s his, with the little white stain from the time Bucky wanted to see if it would change colors so they poured bleach on their fingers (Bucky still has—no. Bucky had a scar where the bleach got into a cut. Steve’s mama had been so angry with them). 

But there’s a job and it’s enough to distract him until he goes home and lays in bed, staring at it. There’s even the string, shifting this way and that, and he wonders if it’d be stupid to follow it. To walk and walk until he got a goddamn answer.

They say it’s supposed to complete you. Make you feel reassured that there’s someone out there for you. Steve thinks that’s a load of shit, and this is worse than waking up out of time. This is so much crueler. 

*

It’s not something you pay attention to in the middle of a fight, so he couldn’t say if the string connect his ring to his soulmate’s is contracting while he fights the Winter Soldier. 

It isn’t until Bucky’s looking back at him that Steve sees it. 

It isn’t until Bucky’s rolling to his feet after Sam kicks him in the head that he sees it, staring at his metal hand—what the hell—and then following the line back to Steve. He seems—afraid. Confused, lost, all these things that Steve has never seen Bucky look, and then Natasha’s firing and Bucky’s gone and Steve still has a job to do.

*

"He’s your soulmate," Sam says.

"I can’t lose him," Steve says. Sam nods, crossing his arm to hide his own ring, and says, 

"Okay."

*

It kills him to fight Bucky. He keeps hoping for some kind of miracle, that Bucky will pause and look around and go, “What the fuck, Steve.”

But he doesn’t. He snarls and makes animal sounds and his eyes go wide and Steve thinks, I just have to finish this. I just have to finish, and then I can be done. 

Because it’s clear Bucky’s not going to remember, and Steve is—

Tired, mostly. 

He’s just tired. 

*

“‘Til the end of the line,” he says, taking off his glove, and Bucky stares at their connected pinkies until the hellicarrier shatters and Steve is falling, falling, falling. 

*

"You’re a fucking moron," Bucky says when Steve wakes up. He looks—more himself. His hair is cut and he’s shaved, in clothes instead of—whatever the hell uniform that was. Steve blinks blearily, and then thinks, You remembered, and, You saved me.

"We lived," he says, and means it to sound cocky but it’s so happy, he sounds so stupidly happy. He can’t help it, splitting his lip open as he beams at Bucky. Bucky rolls his eyes and presses a bit of gauze against it, and Steve reaches up and grabs his hand. It’s metal and sleek and strangely beautiful, and he presses his pinky to Bucky’s so that there’s no string, so it’s one ring tethering them. Steve thinks this time he’s gonna do this right. 

"We’re going dancing," he says. "And on dates. Bucky. The food is so much better now." 

"We are, huh?" 

"Yeah. You and me, ‘till the end of the line."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> vanehwasreal said:  
> (stucky) sam and bucky being awesome friends + sam's not-so-sneaky matchmaking? maybe?

Bucky decides he likes Sam about the same time Steve jumps off of a helicopter without a chute and everyone else acts like it’s not a big deal. Sam dives after him, wings unfurling, and over the radio Bucky can hear him swearing blackly, the ‘oof’ of impact and the longsuffering ‘motherFUCKER.’ 

After the mission Bucky smacks him upside the head as he walks by, and Sam points and says, as Steve makes a wounded sound and looks at Sam for help, “You deserve that.” 

Steve looks between them like a man seeing his doom. 

So at first Bucky starts hanging around Sam just to make Steve nervous. But Sam is funny, turns out, and is fighting hard to keep his center but doesn’t mind being someone else’s anchor, and it’s—nice, Bucky guesses. To have someone who will grab your arm when a sharp noise rings out, as much for his comfort as yours. 

Steve comes over for a morning run and Bucky glares at him over the top of Sam’s couch. They’d stayed up watching Band of Brothers, because, as Sam had put it, “We clearly hate ourselves.” 

"If it’s a robber tell him to take those fucking DVDs!" Sam yells from the bedroom. "If it’s Steve, tell him I’ll be there in fifteen!"

Steve is shifting from foot to foot, eyes darting between Bucky and the closed bedroom door and clearly trying to draw some conclusion. Bucky decides it’s too fucking early and curls back up on the couch, shoving his face into the corner. He’d rather suffocate.

*

"Steve thinks we’re dating and that you’re taking it slow with me," Sam says when Bucky sits down at the table. It’s a new restaurant Sam wanted to try, outdoors and airy and apparently serving up the best cheeseburger in the world. Bucky flexes his fingers, and Sam nods to the hand. 

"They making it better or what?" he asks. "It looks skinnier. Less like a metal glove over a hand and more like an actual prosthetic."

"That’s the goal," Bucky says. "I think we’re close." It’s based on the other one, same basic aesthetic because Zola was fucking insane, but he was apparently centuries beyond his time. Thor, who has practically adopted Steve as his newest brother, had brought someone from Asgard who’d done what Jane insists is science but Bucky has just accepted is goddamn magic. Better that than Stark fucking around with it. 

"Cool," Sam says.

"Wait, we’re dating?"

Sam shrugs, reviewing the menu. “You go for that in the 40s?”

Bucky picks up his own menu. “Wasn’t something you ever saw as being your life.”

It’s not a “no,” because Bucky had. There had been pretty boys and broad-shouldered men who had wanted their cocks sucked and paid for the pleasure, and Bucky liked sex. It hadn’t seemed like that much of a hardship to let someone with money pay for his time when he was trying so damn hard to keep him and Steve afloat without letting on to Steve how damn hard that was. 

Sam nods, but doesn’t pry. It’s still novel to have secrets, though he spent his whole life keeping them. For 70 years he hasn’t been able to make a single decision of his own, nothing in his head was his.

"He looked like it was killing him to say it," Sam says, and then changes the subject to the session he’s leading at the VA.

*

"You know, it’s funny," Sam says, finding Bucky out on the balcony. Stark is throwing some fundraiser for Wounded Warriors and Bucky thinks it’s important, so he came. But Tony Stark isn’t that different from Howard Stark, and Bucky punched that guy twice. 

"What?" Bucky asks, when Sam doesn’t continue. 

"He told me to dance with you," Sam says. "Said you liked dancing best."

Bucky did—does. He likes to dance, and Steve would never, ever come out with him, not even with a dame on his arm. 

"At some point we should tell him to shut the hell up," Bucky says, and Sam grins. "I did." 

He heads back in and Steve steps out. He’s got a square jaw and his right shoulder’s just that fraction higher than the left, and Bucky sighs and puts down his drink. 

Steve’s about to pick fights, and obviously Bucky’s responsible for making sure that doesn’t happen.

"Do you wanna—I. Dance?" Steve asks. 

"You don’t dance," Bucky says helpfully, because maybe it’s not a fighting thing, maybe Steve’s just having a stroke. 

"With me. Do you want to dance with me?" Steve says, cheeks pink even in the faded light, and Bucky grins.

"I didn’t wear my steel-toed boots," he says, stepping away from the railing, and Steve glares.

"Ha ha, asshole," he mutters, but he lets Bucky take his hand, pull him back into the bright room where people are dancing to the opening strains of Moonlight Serenade. 

"You weren’t gonna fight Sam for me?" Bucky asks, and Steve looks at him seriously. 

"It’s important to have friends, Buck," he says, quiet. "It’s—It’d be a jerk thing, to make that about me." 

Bucky grins and nods and dances, and doesn’t say, You idiot, it’s always about you.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tenebrae-caeli-sunt said: Everyone writes Bucky taking care of sick Steve, pre-serum. I'd like to see Steve taking care of Bucky, competently and compassionately.

"Shut up," Steve says before Bucky can say anything. Bucky closes his mouth, and it hurts to breathe anyway. 

Steve’s ma is a nurse, and since it was just them for so long, and Steve gets beat up so much, his ma showed him a lot. 

"I can’t believe you were fighting without me," Steve says, like he thinks that all 50 pounds of him was gonna make a difference. Then again, Steve is scrappy as fuck, so maybe it would’ve.

"Can’t come get—"

"Shut up," Steve says, and Bucky glares at him out of his one good eye. "This is gonna hurt a lot," Steve says, pressing his fingers into the meat of Bucky’s thumb. It’s popped out, and doesn’t hurt, quite. Feels funny, wrong, and then Steve does something quick and it hurts so bad he can’t breathe. 

Steve rubs his chest, is talking, and when the haze clears, he helps Bucky get up, clean up, get home without his ma knowing.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lquacker said: First thing Bucky does every time he wakes up is look for Steve

He wakes up, turns to the left, and says, “I don’t understand why you need  _that_  side.” Steve snores on, the same way he’s done since he was five, and Bucky groans and gets up to put what passes as coffee onto the fire, nodding at Monty, who’s grimacing at his “tea.” 

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and is—he shouldn’t wake up. But if he’s awake, then Steve has to be here. He’s not, though, but Bucky’s quickly distracted by Zola and his new metal arm and then just—black. This war’s made it easy to do the unthinkable: be glad Steve’s not at his side.

 

*

He wakes up and…turns? Tries—there’s—but it—it’s not—him? Or maybe it is. There are—it’s. Right? But there’s. It’s. Not.

*

He wakes up and it’s wrong. And it’s wrong. And it’s wrong. And it’s wrong. 

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and there’s no one there. He’s in a hospital. There’s an IV in his arm. He’s—that feels wrong. He doesn’t wake up alone. Even if it’s wrong, he never wakes up alone.

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and there are doctors, and he panics. Remembers a fall and his hand glints metal and that’s _wrong wrong wrong_ — and then there’s black.

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and Steve says, “Hey, Bucky” and he never wants to sleep again. 

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and Steve says, “Coffee’s waiting,”

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and Steve says, “I think we should take a vacation.”

*

He wakes up, turns to the left, and Steve says, “You never used to sleep in.” 

*

He wakes, up, turns to the left, and thinks it might be nice, just once, to sleep on that side of the bed. Steve snores on, and Bucky gets up to make coffee.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> swingsetindecember said: stucky meet at ikea

They’re in the back, somewhere by the beds, when Bucky looks around and Steve says, “We’re never getting out of here.” 

Bucky ignores him and looks at the beds. Steve tries a different tactic.

"I just don’t think this is sturdy enough to sleep on," Steve says, pressing down on the display frame. "Let alone…" he trails off, and a woman pauses, looks between them and says, 

"It’ll break in five minutes."

Bucky grins at her and she grins back before she turns around a corner.

"That’s going to be on twitter," Steve sighs. 

"Okay, no bed," Bucky says, ignoring him and looking at his phone. "Darcy says that we can get shelves here, though. And lamps, and desks and couches."

"The apartment doesn’t need shelves," Steve groans. He feels like they’ve been here forever. They have a  _nice place_. It’s a townhouse in Brooklyn, not the old neighborhood but Steve thinks that’s probably good. Sometimes he wakes up and has trouble with what year it is, and he knows the reason NPR is always on first thing in the morning is so that Bucky can ground himself. 

The townhouse is nice, though, with lots of built-in shelving. They should be antiquing, not…buying this. None of this is going to look right. 

"I genuinely can’t tell if those smell good anymore or not," Bucky muses later, looking between the same five lamps. Steve feels his will to live draining from him. Maybe he’s like superman, but his kryptonite is ikea. The meatballs haven’t smelled good for hours, but he still wants a million of them. They were close to the door. The fact that he can smell them means they might be close to freedom.

Then again.

"We’re never going to find the door," Steve says. "That couple has gone by seven times. I’ve counted."

"I want to bring Thor here next time," Bucky says. "He’d be able to pronounce these."

Bucky speaks nineteen languages. Steve’s pretty sure that he can pronounce these too, he’s just being stubborn. See also: his selective deafness to Steve’s pain. Steve had forgotten that Bucky was like this. He’d almost like to be able to blame it on HYDRA programming, but no. This was just James Buchanan Barnes, the asshole Steve was in love with. 

By the time they wind up by cribs—CRIBS!!—Steve feels a lot like the kid he saw by the woven basket, only it’s not socially acceptable for him to throw himself onto the ground and refuse to go on. He knew there were drawbacks to being tall.

Bucky is talking to a couple of girls, and Steve decides that his feet hurt, he feels like he will need a map to get out, and that this was a waste anyway because  _Bucky hasn’t bought anything_. 

"Buck," he says, leaning into him. It’s gratifying the way Bucky’s attention immediately shifts. "I am going to die if we don’t leave. And I punched Hitler in the face 200 times."

"And this is gonna be the thing that ends you. Ikea," Bucky says, dry, but shifting so he can slide an arm around Steve. The two women he was talking to laugh and go further into the crib display. 

"The twenty-first century is full of dangerous things, Buck," Steve says earnestly. "We can’t be sure this isn’t sucking our souls out."

Bucky snorts, but he navigates them out and back home, and spends a couple of hours ensuring Steve’s soul—and all the other bits of him—are still intact. 

Steve 1, Ikea 0.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lazulisong said: YO BUCKY VS NATASHA'S IRON CONTROL OF STEVE'S WARDROBE AND BY THAT I MEAN CAPTAIN TIGHTPANTS RIDES AGAIN AMD EVERYTHING IS THE WORST

They all get it. Bucky likes clothes. Steve doesn’t blink when Bucky shows up wearing skinny jeans and a soft henley. 

"He’s a clothes slut," Tony realizes in dawning wonder, and Sam will admit that that…seems to be the case. He gets some company to update his wartime jacket (complete with the goddamn wing on the left arm) into a peacoat that he wears incessantly when the weather turns crisp. 

He shows up on  _Humans of New York_  for God’s sake. 

And that’s fine. Steve stays in his usual t-shirt/jacket/jeans combo and sometimes throws on a plaid shirt that Sam realizes is designed to make Bucky glare at him so hard Sam’s surprised it doesn’t burst into flames. 

"It’s stable," Natasha says one day when Bucky makes a noise of disgust. "It’s easy. Mix and match. Dummy-proof." 

Bucky stares at her. “This is your fault.” 

"It’s an upgrade from khakis and plaid, okay?" she says. 

And honestly Sam didn’t think about it until Natasha came back and sprawled beside him.

"They went shopping," she says. 

"…For what?" Sam asks. They’re all pretty comfortable crashing at Stark Tower, not a lot to shop for. 

"Clothes," she says. "I’m signing over control of the wardrobe."

Sam shrugs that off too. 

Until Steve comes back with Bucky. It’s the pants. It’s the—the jeans. They’re not skinny-jeans, but Sam has never seen a pair of jeans hug someone’s ass that lasciviously in his goddamn life. 

"Well, you just couldn’t incentivize him right," Sam says. 

"Easier to get him to put them on when you promise to take them off," she agrees, and they both stare for a good minute, because  _damn_. 

(The best part is that Steve is completely unselfconscious about it, but then, the man wore running shirts so tight they might as well be second skin, so maybe that wasn’t really surprising.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lilacblossoms said: Steve is resting up after a semi-serious injury and Bucky wants to blow him because "endorphins are great for pain control" :3 :3 :3

Bucky’s answer to everything has always been sex. Steve was never sure how “kiss it better” escalated to “a blowjob will make it better, Steve, trust me” but, you know. They’d been 13 and Bucky was extremely convincing. 

Steve thinks it got really out of hand when he’d been sick and had woken up exhaling clearly for the first time in a week as he came down Bucky’s throat. 

And they never really talked about it, and it never—it was always something Bucky did for Steve. Steve was sick, and hurt, and Bucky took care of him. That was how it worked, and there were times when Bucky looked like an animal that’d spook. Steve hadn’t—well. He’d been too selfish to spook him. 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> queenklu said: Steve and/or Bucky singing to each other pLEEeeaaaeeese

Bucky liked to sing. He’d sing the upbeat stuff, the stuff you could dance to, hum his way through the stuff that didn’t have words. When he didn’t know the words, he made them up.

Steve spent a solid week after getting Bucky back from Schmidt singing. He sang everything he could think of, up to and including goddamn Star Spangled Man with a Plan. He couldn’t say why it’d felt important, but it had been. 

Bucky had started back up when they got out on missions. Morita liked to sing, and Bucky would correct a word here or there, pull him back towards the tune. Liking to sing didn’t mean much. 

Steve regretted missing it when Bucky started singing or humming goddamn Star Spangled Man with a Plan every time they headed for a sitrep. The other howlies thought it was great, all joined in, learned all the additional verses Bucky made up. Steve spent a lot of time glaring at the side of Bucky’s face, and Bucky spent a long time humming  _My Melancholy Baby_ out the side of his smirk.

*

He wakes up and music isn’t—it’s not his first instinct on what to catch up. Not his first choice, he wants to watch the movies. He’d loved movies, they’d snuck into dozens of them, spent winters at the pictures when the apartments were too cold.

But sometimes he hears something and thinks, unbidden,  _Bucky would love that._ Or, just as often,  _I wish I could see Bucky’s face listening to this._  And sometimes wanting to tell someone that the songs that made everyone roll their eyes at would be the ones Bucky would inevitably love, sing loud and obnoxious.

*

Steve tells them to use music. They play Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney and The Andrews Sisters, Glenn Miller. 

Which is fine, and normal, until he comes out of a counseling session with an iPod. Natasha is beaming, Sam has a lot of words about differentiated coping strategies and Steve doesn’t have the words to explain that Bucky has seventy years worth of songs, now, to sing at Steve. 

They don’t have to listen to him.

They don’t wake up at 1:00am dazed and confused because Bucky is whistling [Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjFaenf1T-Y) or making up his own words to [Barbie Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyhrYis509A). They don’t have Pandora radio CONSTANTLY on, at least in the 30s Bucky couldn’t do the thing he does now, which is compulsively listen to something until he’s gotten it out of his system. Steve has listened to [Just Like Jesse James](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siJmE75-xA0) 56 times according to iTunes. 

And the thing is, it’s driving him insane. But then Bucky finds Beyoncé and Natasha shows him youtube and Steve’s life becomes a living hell. 

Bucky really, really likes [Partition](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ12_E5R3qc). Steve’s life is shit.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: what are your favorite headcanons for your stephanie rogers verse?

She once considered feigning a cat allergy. She’s not allergic, shockingly, but by the time they’re 15 Bucky has approximately 500 of them that follow him and meow hopefully at the window and she’s only sure it’s going to get worse. By the time they’re 22 and in their own place she’s pretty sure it’s all of Brooklyn and it’s too late. She hates those cats.

She spent most of her childhood listening to women in the neighborhood talk about how so-and-so shouldn’t get pregnant, how her husband should be a little less Catholic about the whole thing. She went with her mother to help women who couldn’t get to the hospital and saw them, frail bodies fading fast, broken in the effort to bring forth life. She’s not stupid, she knows that part of the reason she’s heard about those women, seen them up close, was because everyone wanted her to understand that she  _would_  be one of those women. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want a baby.  _  
_

There were times, in the dead cold of January, when her mother was struggling to keep the apartment hot enough and afford her medicine and food and Bucky was missing school to try to help as much as Sarah Rogers would help him, that Stephanie wished, tired and feverish, that the sickness would just take her. It seemed cruel to keep doing this, every year watching her mother and Bucky grow frightened and pale and quiet around her. It’s a secret she keeps close, those moments of weakness, because she’s broken their hearts enough as it is. And it’s easy, in the light of June, to forget that it was ever that bad; that she was ever that tired.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> bananapoleon said: Prompt: Bucky is un-brainwashed before Steve ever gets out of the ice, and is there for him when he wakes up

He whirls around and around, because it’s not Times Square—not like he knows, anyway. The game was from the wrong year and the room was a damn movie set and the cars are all wrong, the billboards, hell, even the buildings are wrong. His chest is burning like he’s about to have a bad attack, except he hasn’t had one of those since Erskine and Stark put him in a box. 

"You gotta breathe," Bucky says, and Steve whirls around, trips over his own feet. Bucky catches him, and Steve stares at Bucky’s left hand, because it’s—metal. And then he looks up, because—

He saw Bucky fall. He remembers—Steve thinks he could forget everything, his name, his mother’s face, everything, but he will always, always remember Bucky falling, remember how half a foot felt like miles, how it had stretched and stretched while Bucky had gripped at the air.

"So obviously I didn’t die," Bucky says while Steve concentrates on breathing, gripping him tight. There are people around them, he’s vaguely aware of people blocking them off, guarding a perimeter. 

"Me either," Steve says, because he didn’t. He is, improbably, alive. He also can’t believe he’s going to ask this: "What year is it?"

"2011," Bucky says sympathetically. "And before you start, none of that was my idea. I, uh. I’m actually supposed to be in France, right now." He grins at Steve, and Steve wonders who the hell told Bucky, who never really wanted to fight anyone’s war, to go back into battle. Wonders why Bucky would agree to it. 

In any event, it doesn’t matter. Not just yet. Bucky is supposed to be right here, because if Steve was going to crash his plane in the arctic and then wake up in a brand new century sixty-odd years later, it seems only fair that Bucky be here with him in black pants that seem like he must have been sewed into them, his old coat shrugged over a plain white tee. 

"He is, though I see he was probably right," a deep voice behind them says. The guys is tall, with a leather trench coat and an eyepatch. He looks like a comic book villain. "I’m sorry about that little show back there," the guys continues, resting easily in front of them, and Steve recognizes the tone of a superior officer. Half-genuinely meaning what he’s saying, half not giving a shit how it’s being received. Steve takes in the black cars, the men in black suits, but mostly the way Bucky isn’t braced, just resting easily, pressing his shoulder against Steve’s. Ally, then. "We thought it best to break it to you slowly."

Steve nods, and then looks at Bucky again. 

"You gonna be okay?" the officer asks, mild. Steve wonders what Bucky was like when they found him, that they’re all so ready for violence, that they’ve got snipers up high, that they’re using such a show of force. 

Bucky just quirks his eyebrows at Steve, expectant, and Steve nods, exhaling slowly. It’s less overwhelming to just focus on Bucky. “Yeah,” he tells the officer. “Yeah, I’m okay.” 


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> littleletknown said: Winter Soldier prompt: Could I have some Domestic AU please? I need some happiness in this fandom and stat!

Bucky shows up on Steve’s door with a bag of groceries. 

Steve considers the fact that Bucky is in scrubs, and then weighs that against the frozen dinners in his freezer, and lets him in. He’ll deal with SHIELD freaking out about losing Bucky later, but Steve hasn’t had a meal that tasted the way it should in over a—well, three years, give or take, on either side of the war. 

Bucky opens the freezer and gives Steve a withering look. It gets even more judgmental when he opens the refrigerator to find it mostly bare. It’s mostly condiments and fruit. 

"You can’t really blame me," Steve says as he sits at the counter. He is fully prepared to be on dicing duty, which was the only thing both Sara Rogers and Bucky had agreed he could do. "You never let me cook."

"I let you cook," Bucky argues, pulling all kinds of things out. One of the bags apparently has cooking utensils, which is good, since Steve’s not sure he actually even owns a pot. "You just burnt everything, or got real dumb about it." 

They’d been poor, real poor, and Steve’s going to go to his grave defending his soups, which Bucky had always argued were more water than anything that could be called a ‘soup.’ Which, technically, they had been, but they’d been  _poor_. 

"Which is why your mother told me all the recipes," Bucky continues, moving around the kitchen easily. Steve pauses just to appreciate that fact, for a moment. The fact that Bucky is so at-ease, here, so much more than an echo of himself. It’s been—it’s been a long time since Steve’s seen that. The memories are coming back more and more, especially now that Bucky’s not fighting for them. In a cruel twist, it seems that the less effort Bucky puts into recalling things, the more he remembers. 

"My mother told you all the recipes because despite being  _my_ mother, she liked you better,” Steve says. 

"That’s probably true," Bucky agrees, even though it hadn’t been. Steve had never had reason to doubt that he was the sun in his mother’s life: the thing around which everything revolved. She had laughed and told him stories and even when she’d been too tired to do much but curl up with him in bed, he’d still felt treasured. Bucky, on the other hand, Steve doesn’t think ever felt that way. One more mouth to feed, almost always in trouble (though to be fair, a large portion of that trouble had been Steve’s). 

Steve’s phone chirps, and Bucky pauses, the tiniest jarred movement before going back to—oh God, it’s gonna be corned beef. It’s gonna be a goddamn boiled dinner and Steve could cry because that’s the most beautiful thing in the world. He doesn’t care if aliens are attacking again, he isn’t leaving his kitchen. 

"Hello?" 

 _"Is he with you?"_  Natasha asks.

"Yeah," Steve says, watching Bucky slice carrots and cabbage and potatoes. Oh god, he’s going to make mustard. 

 _"Hm_ ,” Natasha says, like she’s thinking about how she wants to parse this. 

"I’ll have him check in tomorrow morning. Tonight we’re gonna have dinner and dessert and then pancakes." 

 _"You can’t cook,"_  she says immediately, and Steve’s going to get a complex here, but then she says,  _"Ah."_

He can hear the smirk, but he just can’t bring himself to care because Bucky just rolled his eyes at the mention of pancakes which wasn’t a ‘no’, and Dernier had shown Bucky how to make crepes and Steve is willing to crawl on his belly for miles in enemy territory to get those. It’s 2014, he’s sure he can come up with some other kind of bribe.

"Call you later," Steve says, and hangs up. "You remember the recipe for Frenchy’s—"

"What’re you gonna do when they take me back?"

"I’m sure I can get you released into my custody," Steve says, not really thinking about it. Well, no. He has been thinking about it. About how they could move to Brooklyn, where things have changed but stayed the same in a lot of ways. They could get a two-bedroom, and Steve would be able to be there when Bucky got nightmares, instead of getting calls where Bucky can’t even talk, just breathes harshly on the other end of the line while Steve blearily tries to reassure him, not knowing quite what’s wrong. Bucky breaks out of protective custody so regularly and so easily that there’s really no point in keeping up the charade, anyway, and enough of the Avengers are living in New York that it—it might be good. He’ll talk to Bucky about it over breakfast, because Bucky, in one of those things that had been such a relief to find out, still takes a couple hours in the morning to get going. 

Steve’s not above taking advantage of that. 

"Dice the potatoes," is all Bucky tells him. Steve grins and grabs the sack of potatoes and a knife and settles to work. Last time they wound up living together Steve’s mom had died, and Bucky had bullied—insomuch as Bucky ever bullied Steve (it was really more like aggressive mother-henning, but Steve knew better than to  _say_  that)—Steve into moving in with him. Bucky had supported Steve through art school, through bouts of sickness that lost him jobs, and when Steve’d finally moved out, it’d been only a year before the war started. 

"So I found this nice two-bedroom in Brooklyn," Steve starts.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous said: what if like bucky's therapist encourages him to pick up a hobby that has absolutely nothing to do with espionage etc? like embroidery or cross-stitch or macrame? and he just leaves these intricate pieces of embroidery all over the avengers tower? and then tony interprets bucky's actions as like a serious cry for help and freaks out when he finds a macrame iron man on top of his dresser?

They all think that it’s a new hobby, and Steve lets them. But Bucky’s been able to do a mean cross-stitch since before Steve met him, said he learned it from his mother, and then it was something to bring in extra money, and then it’d been applied to sewing the rest of the Howlers up—

So Steve just buys threads and needles and listens to Bucky bitch about synthetics—Steve swears Bucky learns the internet just to buy his precious thread, and if Bucky thinks Steve isn’t going to make fun of him for that from here to kingdom come he’s got another thing coming. 

And then Clint shows Bucky something from Etsy, and all Steve knows is he’s got a pillow that says  _FUCK YOU_  and a hand towel that says  _PUNK_ and somehow Dum-E ended up with a bib that says  _SMARTEST ONE IN THE ROOM_ that seems to have Tony torn between being infuriated and deeply, deeply amused.

"You can sell those," Clint points out helpfully one day, and then there’s a goddamn Etsy shop full of beautiful, delicately-done, incredibly profane cross-stitch.

"So you can start paying rent now," Steve says when Bucky crows about how much it’s making (it’s a lot. It’s way more than it should be).

Bucky turns wide, wounded eyes on him. “But—I thought you said not to worry about it.”

"Oh Christ," Steve mutters.

"I thought you said that while I was in recovery—"

"Buck."

"—that I shouldn’t worry, that I should focus on my hobbies and getting better and—"

"Please stop, Sam is going to walk in the door and think I’m actually re-traumatizing you."

"—this is is making me  _happy_.”

"Fine!" Steve groans, throwing his hands up. "I’ll just keep you in the manner to which you’ve become accustomed, okay?"

"Yeah, that’d be great," Bucky says easily, and if he thinks Steve misses the sly smile he shoots at Natasha (who is clearly in the doorway only to observe how incredibly whipped Steve is), well. He’s a moron.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Blanket Permission:** go ahead and translate, make podfic, rework the fic, or do whatever other transformative work you can think of. If the work is hosted on another site, drop me a comment or email and I'll put a link in the story notes!
> 
> [twitter:](https://twitter.com/waldorph) for unfiltered me || [tumblr:](http://waldorph.tumblr.com/) less about me, more about the pretty gifsets and art


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